RE: The App Store Effect

["John Cox" <John.E.Cox@btinternet.com>]

[MOD NOTE: Thank you, John, for catching this error. The original 
posting arrived with formatting characters that messed with the 
numbers; though we thought we'd cleaned them up, obviously we 
didn't know to remove the pesky and ultra-important 3s.]

Please note that this posting is misleading as an extraneous "3" 
appears in both the numbers quoted.  UK universities and colleges 
spent GBP 79.8 million on electronic serials in 2006-07.  The 
average direct cost per download was GBP 0.81.  It is important 
to get the numbers right.

It is absolutely right that the cost per item may fall further if 
all these e-journals were to be licensed collectively on a 
UK-wide basis.  And the most significant benefit would be to 
those universities are not research-intensive and do not have 
large journal collections, rather than "public access". 
Moreover, I see no reason why corporate, government and other 
special library users should have a free ride on what the 
university and college sector would be financing.  That would 
throw an additional burden on a higher education (HE) sector that 
is facing hard times.

It should also be noted that the e-journals that UK HE are 
published by thousands of publishers, most of which are small, 
with only one or two titles.  It is simply not a practicable 
proposition to invest in the manpower needed to negotiate 
national licences with publishers that publish only one or two 
titles.  Negotiating licences with the major publishers is one 
thing.  But the long tail of small publishers is another.

John Cox
Managing Director
John Cox Associates Ltd
Rookwood
Bradden
TOWCESTER
Northants
NN12 8ED
United Kingdom
E-mail: John.E.Cox@btinternet.com
Web: www.johncoxassociates.co.uk


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Armbruster, Chris
Sent: 16 June 2009 23:36
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: RE: The App Store Effect

What about the following key finding made by CIBER on behalf of
RIN for the UK: "UK universities and colleges spent in excess of
379.8m licensing electronic journals during 2006/07.  The level
of use of these resources is enormous: almost 102 million
articles were downloaded that year, at an average (direct) cost
of 30.81."  [MOD:  POUNDS?]

I note that the price tag is below 1 GBP/EURO/USD per item. If
these deals were turned into national licensing deals with public
access it is possible that the average cost would fall further...

Anybody like to comment?

The full paper may be fournd at:
http://www.rin.ac.uk/use-ejournals

The file is:
Journal_spending_use_outcomes_CIBER_ejournals_working_paper.pdf

Chris Armbruster